Tag Archives: photographs

I had a bit of a party yesterday to celebrate a bit of a birthday. For half a day (I mean 12 hours) I took over the party room on the 33rd floor of the building where I live, and a goodly number of friends joined me to celebrate my attainment of half a century – or, as my brother reminded me, a third of a sesquicentury. (And 50 is one and a half times 33, so there’s that too.)

A 50th anniversary is a golden one, but 50 is the atomic number of tin, not gold. As it happens, my hair used to be gold, or goldish anyway, but is now much more the colour of tin. If you see 50 on a tin in Canada, it may be a can of Labatt’s 50, which is a beer. I suppose I could have been clever and served Labatt’s 50 at my party, but it’s not the sort of beer I buy often. Anyway, I was more focused on the sparkling wine, of which I bought two cases to serve those present (along with two cases of still wine, which may not be sparkling but it’s still wine).

The word fifty is obvious enough in its parts: fif– meaning ‘five’ (the v in five was established later – in Old English, [v] was just a possible pronunciation of /f/ between vowels) and -ty a suffix meaning ‘ten’ and coming from a word meaning ‘decade’. But there is another suffix -ty that is related to Latin -itas and makes nouns of quality, such as beauty, royalty, and plenty. If royalty is ‘royalness’, fifty could almost be ‘fiveness’. That might be nifty – but it’s not so.

Many things are 50 in number. The states of the USA, for instance – and Hawai‘i, being the fiftieth to join, wears the number. But 50 is not so often a number of completion; more usually, it’s halfway, or an equal share, although it doesn’t always seem so – a 50% grey looks quite dark to most eyes; for a shade to look halfway between white and black, it needs to be closer to 33% grey, i.e., just 1/3 black (so a third of the way, just as my party room is a third of the way to the 100th floor – if there were one – and I’m a third of the way to being a sesquicentenarian). But 50 can also be a standard. In Canada, for instance, 50 kilometres per hour is the speed limit on any street not otherwise specified. And in 35 mm photography – and its digital equivalent, “full-frame” sensors – the standard “normal” lens has a focal length of 50 millimetres. In truth, it’s a slightly narrower angle of view than would best match what your eye sees in the same image area, but the length was established by Leitz for their Leica cameras on the basis of what they could make best at that time.

As it happens, I was using a Leitz 50mm lens during the party – I had it on my Sony camera; I took a picture of nearly every friend and family member who came (I missed a few). After night fell, I swapped to a faster, glowier 50mm lens. So it was 50–50, but it was always 50, though not for the sake of cleverness; I just wanted the look those lenses have. And so here I present what getting to be 50 has meant to me more than anything else: people. My family and friends. Here are 50 pictures of them (among which is one of me). Continue reading →

After my tasting of Toronto with pictures, and its sequel Toronto, part 2, I decided it would be fun to make a photo book with five-and-a-half dozen photos of Toronto, mainly to give some to people such as my parents. I was going to publish it via Lulu, where I’ve done Songs of Love and Grammar, but it turned out that for printing photos at a decent quality on decent paper I would face a choice of using one of their (ghastly, trite) templates or making an overlarge, very expensive volume. So I used Blurb instead. As you can see, it is a reality:

Alas, Blurb is not so cheap either. As you will see on Blurb, this 72-page book, not much over six inches square, lists at $35 Canadian ($28.69 US right now), which is rather a lot given its size – but a larger format would cost proportionally more. However, as the creator, I can order quantities at a discount, and I ordered a few to give to family with a few left over. If you fancy buying one off me for $25 Canadian (plus postage if necessary), let me know – email james at harbeck dot ca.

(If, on the other hand, you’d like a PDF copy of it, that can be arranged in exchange for a drink or some similar consideration; just email me to ask.)

Memory is an immense pentimento, strokes of the past showing through but always partially extincted by more recent tincture. Given a means of external storage, we often avail ourselves of it to freeze time. But what do we choose to remember? What are the moments we digitize into a permanent convertible ephemerality? What mementos will we take with us?

Does it matter? We amass them while we live to put together a narrative of our lives, a motif of moments. A constellation of our lives.

Constellations are made from stars, as we know. We seek stars to remember seeing: high points of light. This evening I stopped through the street festival for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). They have a red carpet area, well lit, and people surround it awaiting the famous ones, cameras ready for any glimpse. One person came up to a group of several standing on a planter for a better view and asked of a latter-day Zacchaeus, “Who’s coming out?” The spectator looked downward and said, “I don’t know.” But whoever it is, it will be a star, and a moment to remember.

Moment? Momento? It’s no surprise that the misspelling persists; the misanalysis has momentum. Magic moments make for mementos. And each memento moment may have two parts: the explosive effervescent of the moment, metaphorically like a sleeve of Mentos released into a bottle of Diet Coke, and the persistent image, made to be a meme, just a motif of emotion capable of captions multifarious. One is clear but evanescent, the other lasting but open to reinterpretation.

There is a movie, Memento, made in 2000, about a man who has anterograde amnesia. Digital cameras in every phone were not a thing at the time, and his memory was made of Polaroid photos that had physical persistance and could be written on – but also destroyed – and tattoos that were indelible but often inscrutable. He would never remember what had happened more than five minutes before, so he had to record the important parts to help him solve a mystery… or to create a mystery for his future self.

As we do. Flip through an album of photos, on paper or on your phone. See what things your camera has seen. Try to retrace a timeline of your life. What was that? And that? Was it really so? Or is it a pleasant part-fiction directed by previous you to mislead your future selves? It has all been selected and edited. It seems to make sense. But you will never breathe those breaths on those days again, so what is left?

Thus we raise our lenses and sensors; we resolve to resolve life into pixels so that a flat chip of time may take us back and prove that we were there in that moment. We could also buy or retain a thing, a souvenir, a flake of a life. It will be forever the age it is; a memento is frozen in death the moment it is born, and in time it acquires other layers, as the fresh memory fades and other associations attach. We just remember that we were one such person in one such place, with these things and these people, and the thread of our life is seen not as a coloured line among many thrown by a shuttle in a loom but as a single tight string twisted from peg to peg, nail to nail, each tack polished to look like a star; in the end this twiny constellation is meant to present our image, but we can never step apart to see it so.

But those are the instant-thin mementoes, already moribund. There is another memento to go with mori: memento vivere, ‘remember to live, remember life’. We cannot capture that with our cameras, of course, but it is the other part of the same experience: each shutter click is a paddle dip in a river, each memento maintaining momentum in the stream of life. I was here now, and here now, and here now. And from this we see the way forward.

We all have our piers, and we would be stranded – and none the happier – were they to disappier. We say no person is an island, but in one sense we all are, or at least it shore feels like it: there are always fluid expanses between us and others – sometimes gulfs, sometimes straits (at times dire ones). To embark on our contact with the world, we need to extend ourselves outwards into the open waters. As others likewise build their piers, and we can launch our communications, we form our pier groups to group with our peers.

What is a pier, really, literally? A popular diagram of late shows differences between a quay, a wharf, a pier, and a jetty on the basis of whether they are fill (or stone, or concrete) or piles (wood or metal) and whether they are parallel or perpendicular to the shore: according to it, a quay is parallel fill, a wharf is parallel piles, a pier is perpendicular piles, and a jetty is perpendicular fill. In the real world it’s not quite so simple, and wharf, pier, and dock are used in overlapping ways. But you can generally count on a pier being perpendicular to the shoreline and built on piles.

You can’t, on the other hand, count on what it’s used for. Wikipedia divides piers into three types: working piers (for commerce boats), pleasure piers (as at Brighton and Santa Monica), and fishing (angling) piers. I like this division, mainly because it is also a suitable division of our peers in the world – some we work with, some we play with, some we just… angle with (see LinkedIn).

Pier is also a personal name, as for instance the Italian filmmaker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini. There are quite a few Piers in the world, mostly Italian. (There are also people named Piers, but I really don’t want to have to talk about the best-known current bearer of that name.) Of course Piers have their peers and piers, but in this there is irony: piers are normally built on wooden (or metal) piles, but Pier, like Peter, comes from Greek Πέτρος Petros: ‘stone’.

I spent much of last Thursday in one of my favourite places, doing one of my favourite things. Since I was a kid, I have loved gardens and landscaping and trees and flowers – not that I have a garden myself (doing things that involve actual dirt under the fingernails may not be my forte), but I love being in a nice garden or well landscaped park. Such a place is, for me, like a stronghold of peace and pleasantness and endless interest. And aside from walking in gardens and being surrounded by them, I also like taking pictures of them, not for any good reason other than that I like taking pictures.

I don’t mean “How are you supposed to say it?” I mean “How do you say it?” I know how we’re supposed to say it. The citation form, as linguists call it, is /ˈpoʊstˌkɑrd/ (or, with a standard British accent, /ˈpəʊstkɑːd/). But that’s not the everyday form of it. Listen to yourself say it: you almost never say the /t/ in there.

Which is fine. It is thereby uttered more efficiently, which is also a point of using postcards: they are smaller and lighter and more quickly sent, supposedly. They also limit the text that can be included, thereby reducing the burden on both sender and receiver. As a message a postcard is a quick salutation, a social nicety nicely discharged. Postcards are lately increasingly displaced by Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, but there’s still something about physical evidence – and a tangible, durable, non-ephemeral form.

The evidential nature is key to a postcard. It says you were there. And it shows where there is, what it looks like. Not what it looked like to you when you were there, though. Not what you would have taken with your own camera (cell-phone or otherwise). Look, you just can’t get a good shot without all those doofuses (doofi?) and their stupid cars, cars, cars in the way. (If there are people or vehicles in postcards, it’s because you can always expect to see some people or vehicles there and these ones are no longer individuals but tokens standing for a general type – postcards are the opposite of reportage.) And the light is wrong and the sky is wrong and blah. This is one reason people still buy postcards even if they seldom mail them to anyone: the photos you take on your trip, no matter how good a photographer you are, will never be as perfect as postcard pictures, nor as close to memory. Besides, you’re busy taking pictures of your family and friends standing in front of the things you’re there to see. Evidence, remember? But a postcard shows what it’s supposed to look like. A typical view. Its citation form.

Except that postcards take on the aspect of memories, and we know that memories distort, exaggerate, simplify. While the uttered forms of words are generally reduced from their citation forms, the citation forms of places are typically reduced from their experienced forms: vivid and uncomplicated.

Vivid and uncomplicated. That is the essence not just of the subjects and compositions of most postcards but also of the colours in them until more recent decades. I’m quite fond of old postcards – I don’t collect them, but I love seeing them online on sites such as messynessychic.com. And they have a look that stands out. The colours are often somewhat faded and yellowed with age, but you can still see that the exigencies of inexpensive printing in quantity meant that the inks were very contrasty, and so the blacks are often a bit thick and punchy, and the colours are vivid and uncomplicated. There’s a lot of colour but not a lot of subtle variations in the colour. In technical terms, they’re very saturated but lacking in colour depth. The earliest colour postcards are even more so: they were black-and-white photos with colour added, so of course the colour doesn’t have a lot of detail – the black ink gives all the detail.

Another feature of many older postcards, usually absent from more recent ones, is captions on the pictures. Oh, you can buy postcards with very splashy florid writing proclaiming Miami! for example, but the older ones had more detailed captions, sometimes even whole sentences, printed on the picture or beneath it.

So. On the front you have the vivid and uncomplicated citation forms of the sights you see. There may be a pithy statement. On the back you get to write some anodyne distillation or simple evidentiary salutation. The contents vary; the classic is “Hawaii is fun, wish you were here,” but my personal experience ranges from one relation who, on at least one occasion, copied text from a tourist brochure just to have something to write, to another relation (an extremely close one, often inches away) who has at times fit 200 or more words of travelogue on a standard postcard.

As may be known, I like taking pictures. I decided lately to do a series of photos of Toronto done up somewhat like old postcards, with the simple colours, the contrasty blacks, the aged look, the on-photo captions. Because why not. I also kept strictly to a 4-by-5 size, although I did allow some of them to be vertical (a little bit of a cheat). I put a number of them on my Flickr on Saturday. On Sunday I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario and found – and bought – a little book of mid-century postcards of unremarkable sights around Britain, titled Boring Postcards. It was obviously meant to be.

Here are a few of my postcards from Toronto. The captions may be slightly different from the classic style. Oh well.

I know, I know. Funky is something you hear or something you smell. Bear with me. You can’t smell this blog, right? And if you could it would not smell funky.

What, by the way, is a funky smell? Not everyone uses the word for smells anymore. But if you do, you know it. It’s the smell like something wild crawled under your house for a long, long, long nap.It’s what you get if game farm animals take over the game farm. It’s the aroma of Normandy farmhouse cheese, or rutting badgers, or Uncle Phil after he’s been out at his hunting camp for a week. It’s earthy.

It used to be smoky. The verb funk, not really used now, meant – in the 1700s and into the 1800s – ‘blow smoke on someone’. It seems to trace back to Latin fumicare. From that we got a more general noun sense of ‘strong smell, stink’. And so something that’s funky is really… earthy. Unwashed. Down and dirty.

Which is how it got into music. In the early-to-mid 1900s, jazz musicians used funky as a term for a really down-to-earth approach. Not rarefied, delicate, pensive, airy. Nope. Getting into the dirt. Hit that bass and play some heavy lines that get you grooving down. We’re talking syncopation here that sets you grinding. By the time of James Brown in the 1960s, funky music had become funk music, a distinct style, and Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye – and lots of others – really made it popular everywhere.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of other apparently unrelated funks. There’s the one that means a state of depression or cowardice, as in blue funk. And there’s one that’s not used anymore, meaning ‘spark’ – its cognate is still there to see in German, and you’ll hear it in Beethoven’s 9th: Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium – ‘Joy, beautiful spark of Gods, daughter from Elysium’.

Well, funky music is not cowardly, nope, though it can in another sense be blue. But it does have a spark. A lot of sparks. And some of them are sparking up the cigarettes and cigars being smoked in the clubs where funk is played. And some of them are coming, with smoke, from the fingers of the musicians.

I heard a lot of funky music on Friday night. Aina and I went for a walk along Queen Street East here in Toronto for the Beaches Jazz Festival. I took my ears. And my camera. And, consequently, quite a few pictures. Now you look and see. They had some funky lighting and I got a little funky with the colours too. By which I mean grooving, sparking, vibrant, and earthy. I don’t know if it captures the feel of the music or not, but man, I tried.

If you want to hear what these bands sound like, I’m telling you the name of each before the pictures so you can go to their sites and have a listen. (And click on any image to see it larger on Flickr.)

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Angry Sub-Editor
Patrick Neylan, Eeditor of business reports. Permanently angry about the abuse of English, maths and logic. Terms and conditions: by reading this blog you accept that all opinions expressed herein will henceforth be your opinions.

The Economist "Johnson" language blog
In this blog, named for the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson, correspondents write about the effects that the use (and sometimes abuse) of language have on politics, society and culture around the world